My gripe is with the artwork itself. It appears to show a wrinkly surface on the sail panels yet the Earth's reflection is not broken up accordingly.

I thought about crackling up the Earth reflection a bit more, but I decided that most folks would have fixated on the unevenness of the reflection and not seen the bigger picture, so to speak. Sometimes complete photographic reality in art is not the best way to go.

Sometimes complete photographic reality in art is not the best way to go.

No gripe with that statement at all. As an artist you are free. My comment arose from the fact that when looking at that particular image and wanting to 'enter the scene' I found myself distracted by the apparent incongruity. But it's all subjective at the viewer's end too and maybe I'm in a minority of one!

At any rate I'm (of late) merely an enthusiast for space art whereas you're actually creating it, so count me as a fan.

No gripe with that statement at all. As an artist you are free. My comment arose from the fact that when looking at that particular image and wanting to 'enter the scene' I found myself distracted by the apparent incongruity. But it's all subjective at the viewer's end too and maybe I'm in a minority of one!

At any rate I'm (of late) merely an enthusiast for space art whereas you're actually creating it, so count me as a fan.

And I have no gripe with your gripe. If there weren't any discussion about things, it would all be pretty boring. A good deal of the space art we do takes liberties with light levels and colors and so on, to make it more accessible, and there's a sliding scale of what is "correct" that runs all the way to total photographic realism, particularly in scientific visualization. Not counting, of course, the horribly gaudy 20X vertical representations of Venus from years back.

And Stu, I do like a -teeny- bit of lens flare now and then (it can be such an overused gimmick), or some subtle play of light that guides the eye to a certain point. Not like in a certain recent movie.

I'm curious if the camera's that were shown in the video are off-the-shelf, or were they designed specifically for the mission of LightSail-1? If they are off-the-shelf, who manufactured the camera's and optics?

The article below mentions three upcoming NASA missions (which will be flown on the venerable Delta 2 rocket) that would reach orbital altitudes that seem desirable for Lightsail-1...which The Planetary Society wants to send to an altitude of 800 km (500 miles):

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